


The Spheres

by Hours_Gone_By



Series: The Adventures of Student!Jazz and Wizard!Prowl [5]
Category: Transformers - Aligned Continuity Family, Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternative Universe - Wizards, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Magic, May/December Relationship, Romantic Fluff, Some Plot, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-21 18:15:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17048177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hours_Gone_By/pseuds/Hours_Gone_By
Summary: Today, there should be no surprises. Today was the day Prowl moved into his new house, the one whose music room had already been promised for Jazz’s use any time he wanted. They had been through the house before, the cursed mirror was cleansed, all the furniture came with the house, so that’d been vetted too. There wouldn’t be anything that could try and feed on him, or twist him into a parody of himself, or chuck stuff at them.





	The Spheres

Jazz had been housesitting over the summer when he had met Prowl, a wizard. (He didn’t mention that part when talking about Prowl.) Prowl had banished the wight that had been feeding on Jazz’s dreams, then stayed a few days at the house. Nothing had happened then, even though they were each clearly attracted to the other, and Prowl had left with a promise to find Jazz later. They’d begun seeing each other after Prowl had shown up on Jazz’s doorstep and taken him to dinner and then to send some poltergeists on their way to whatever afterlife there was. (That part hadn’t been planned, and Jazz didn’t include it when asked about their first date.) Later they’d cleansed a cursed mirror in the house Prowl had afterward chosen to buy. A couple of days ago they’d freed a mini-cassette who’d been trapped in a movie for about eighteen thousand meta-cycles.

The mini-cassette, Rewind, had been reunited with his host, Blaster, and his sibling mini-cassettes. Jazz still had a good feeling about that one, and he didn’t think it’d fade anytime soon. It went to prove a few things Prowl had said about wizards being meant to do good in the world. There had been exceptions. Jazz knew about Shockwave, the wizard who had cursed the now un-cursed mirror that hung on the third-floor landing, and whoever had trapped poor Rewind. Rewind’s memory was a little fragged from his being confined as data for so long, and he hadn’t been able to say. Still, the little guy had Prowl’s comm frequency if he was able to recover anything.

Today, though, there should be no surprises. Today was the day Prowl moved into his new house, the one whose music room had already been promised for Jazz’s use any time he wanted. They had been through the house before, the cursed mirror was cleansed, all the furniture came with the house, so that’d been vetted too. Prowl had made a couple of references to getting a workshop set up but as far as Jazz knew the wizard didn’t have any personal possessions that didn’t fit in his subspace. The workshop gear would probably be bought new. There wouldn’t be anything that could try and feed on him, or twist him into a parody of himself, or chuck stuff at them. There would just be him, and Prowl, and a big empty house with big empty beds that Jazz had _plans_ for.

Of course, as soon as Jazz pulled up in front of Prowl’s townhouse and transformed he knew he’d been wrong. Two delivery mecha were carrying crates – dull, dinged, old boxes with glyphs carved on them – large enough to hold small pieces of furniture into the house and Prowl was standing off to the side, watching.

Prowl’s optics brightened as soon as he saw Jazz, and he walked over – effortlessly dodging one of the movers – to greet the student with a kiss.

“Heya, babe,” Jazz said, perfectly happy to be wrapped up in Prowl’s arms in front of Primus and everybody. “What kinda magical items are you moving in today?”

Prowl tipped his head to the side a little and smiled. “What makes you say they’re magic?”

“Well, they’re yours,” Jazz said pointedly, earning a soft huff of laughter, “and they’re carved with your Wizard’s Alphabet, and, so far, I haven’t seen something with that on it _hasn’t_ been magic.”

“’Wizard’s Alphabet,’” Prowl repeated, clearly amused at the nickname Jazz had given the ancient glyphs. “Yes, I suppose that’s an apt name. The crates contain the equipment for my laboratory and my personal possessions, many of which are, yes, magical in nature.” He regarded Jazz for a few nano-kliks. “I suppose you never have seen me with more than I have in my subspace, have you? It’s true that I have been nomadic for a very long time, but I did once have a home, in Cronum. All that remains of it now are the deep vaults, where these were stored until I retrieved them recently. An acquaintance was good enough to retrieve them and have them shipped to me.”

That was the most Jazz had ever heard Prowl say about his original home and his life before becoming a nomadic hunter. Jazz tended to live very much in the present and hadn’t given too much thought to Prowl’s past. If the wizard wanted him to know about it, he’d tell him. Besides, Prowl was one of the last wizards and his purpose, hunting down predatory magical creatures, had finished when he’d banished the wight. It didn’t take much to see that Prowl might not be ready to talk about his history.

That, and getting information out of him tended to be only a little less difficult than pulling scraplet teeth. Prowl had lived a long time with only himself for company.

“So you know what all’s in the crates?” Jazz asked. “We’re not gonna find some weird cursed thing, or someone trapped in something, are we?”

“I’m aware of the contents,” Prowl assured him. “Everything is contained and safe.”

Jazz nodded. “Okay. And you’ve been over the house?”

“I have. It’s clean.”

Jazz pressed on. “We’re not likely to be interrupted by, don’t know, vampires or were-mechanimals or the stars aligning and bringing some freaky interdimensional horror here?”

Prowl kissed him again, faintly trembling with laughter. “Not tonight, dearest, no.”

“Better not,” Jazz grumbled, but playfully.

One of the movers approached, meaning they had to separate, and handed Prowl a tablet to sign off on. Prowl thumbed the signature block to leave his imprint, and the tablet chirped in acknowledgement. He and the movers wished each other a good mega-cycle, and then Prowl and Jazz were alone.

“It’s been quite a long time since I lived in a home of my own,” Prowl observed, looking up at the front of the house. “Space, a bed every night, a kitchen, a proper workshop.”

Jazz took Prowl’s hand, and they walked up the steps into Prowl’s new home.

“This really means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” Jazz asked.

“Yes.” Prowl opened the door and drew Jazz in with him. The door closed, silent and automatic, behind them. “I didn’t realize how much until I saw my possessions being carried in. The idea of being at home, stationary, in one place for as long as I wish, I – I had forgotten…”

“’S okay if you can’t say it yet,” Jazz assured him. “Can’t say I totally get it cause I ain’t been through it, but I get that it means a lot to you. Want me to help you unpack, help get your new home all set up for you?”

Prowl hadn’t let go of Jazz’s hand, and now he lifted it to brush little kisses across the backs of the fingers. “I’d like that very much.”

Prowl had a total of six crates, and the movers had put them in the appropriate rooms, for which Jazz was grateful because they looked heavy. The first one they unpacked was in the basement, which held the kitchen and the room Prowl had marked as his workshop. Apart from some stuff that looked like it belonged in a chem lab, a lot of what was in the workshop crate just looked like knick-knacks. Jazz had always liked knick-knacks – his mentor, Half-step, used to bring Jazz souvenirs from places he’d been on tour – and not only were these pretty cool, but they also gave him some insight into Prowl. Sometimes the insights were strange ones. Sometimes the items just raised more questions.

“Why do you have a stuffed alloygator?”

“Because I have a workshop. Why else?”

“Oookaayy…Wizard thing.” Jazz should’ve known: he was usually pretty good at spotting those. “Got it. Where d’you want it?”

The crate in the living room held a pair of chairs and a little table that went in front of the window facing out on the rear terrace, plus a few ornaments Prowl helped Jazz place. They gradually moved up through the levels of the house, which had only two rooms on each floor but was still much larger than anywhere Jazz had ever lived, unpacking and arranging.

The whole time, Prowl kept finding excuses to touch Jazz. Just little things: a hand on his back as a caution when the wizard passed by, the brush of a shoulder as they both leaned into the crate for something. A touch on his wrist, hip, or neck here and there. All of it deliberate, none of it overtly or obviously erotic, not one bit, and it was all driving Jazz to distraction. Jazz did his best to give as good as he got but if he had the same effect on Prowl, the older mech didn’t show it. It was putting Jazz on edge in all the best ways and he swore the moment the last item out of the last crate was in place he was going to pounce. If Prowl didn’t get him first, of course. Jazz was okay with either one.

The music room didn’t have a crate, but Prowl took a couple of small boxes out of the one in the library and carried them over.

“I mean this space to be yours,” he said to Jazz, with a little of that adorable shyness tinting his voice for the first time in deca-cycles, “but I thought these would fit well in here.”

“Thanks, Prowl.” Jazz accepted the boxes, setting the bottom one aside temporarily on a side table and opening the top one. It held a beautiful crystal sun-catcher with Wizard Alphabet glyphs carved into the dangling multicoloured crystals. Jazz held it up to the light just to watch the crystals shimmer. “’S gorgeous. What do the glyphs mean?”

“’Peace,’ ‘health,’ ‘home.’” Prowl touched each crystal in turn as he spoke, though he didn’t read off all of them. “You’ll have to learn the Wizard’s Alphabet to read the rest.”

“Was going to ask you to teach me that, actually.” Now he was even more curious. Jazz glanced down into the box, didn’t see any kind of fastener. “Is there a hook or something in the box?” It might be tucked underneath the soft foam the crystals had been nestled in, but Jazz didn’t have a hand free. “I want to put it up, but I want it done right. Don’t want it to fall.” Prowl’d kept this all this time, it had to have meaning to him.

Prowl paused. “I don’t recall. I’ve not seen it in quite some time, of course, and I’m afraid the minor details of old memories are often difficult to access.”

“I’ll check later,” Jazz promised, carefully settling the sun-catcher back in its case. They had to buy hardware to hang or place a few other things, he could pick some up for this one at the same time. “It’s gonna look amazing once it’s up.”

“It casts light for metres when the sun hits it just right,” Prowl volunteered as Jazz opened the second box. “Ah, those. You’ll like those.”

“What do they do?” Jazz asked, picking up one of the seven smooth, transparent, spheres with a glyph encased inside and examining it. Each one was the size of a cue ball and had an accompanying bronze stand.

“Set them up and see,” Prowl suggested. “You may be able to get them to work better than I ever could, in fact.”

“So, they’re not magical?” Jazz was puzzled but took a seat on a nearby sofa with a low table in front of it and started to set the spheres up.

“They are.”

“Okayyy…”

The stands had glyphs done in filigree on them, tiny barely readable things, that matched the ones inside the spheres. They’d been put back in the box out of order, which seemed out of character for Prowl but might have been on purpose since Prowl was obviously teasing Jazz with a puzzle. Prowl perched on the arm of the sofa and watched him set the spheres up in their proper order. Nothing happened, but Jazz wasn’t really surprised. If it were that simple Prowl wouldn’t have said Jazz might be able to get them to work better.

Alright, well, they had glyphs. They weren’t glyphs Jazz recognized from the Wizard’s Alphabet, but they were somehow familiar, so he picked one up and examined it. The glyph was more ornate than the ones Jazz was used to, but if he ignored the flourishes and accent marks and focused on the core of it…

“Musical note,” he said triumphantly. “Got it!” Prowl made an approving sound and Jazz rearranged the spheres into the proper order of the scale. “Magic and music, huh?” He hummed a note, and the matching sphere glowed red. He hummed the sharp, then the flat, of the same note and the shade of red changed with each.

“I’ve wanted to show you these almost since I met you,” Prowl said. “Since you played for me the first time.”

“I just – these are amazing!” Jazz picked up one of the spheres, the blue one, and examined it while he sang a scale to make them all light up, one after the other. “Where did you even find them?”

“I bought them long ago, but I am not a musician.”

“So there’s more to them than just pitch?” It wasn’t the first time Prowl’d drawn connections between music and magic.

“Yes.”

“You’re gonna have to explain the whole music-magic thing to me sometime,” Jazz said.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Prowl said, and not for the first time. “It would be much easier to show you the ways I see and hear them.”

Jazz’s fuel pumped faster through his lines, like he was revving up for a race. He hadn’t quite cooled down from Prowl’s earlier teasing either.

“I’d like that,” he said, tipping his head back to look up at Prowl.

Prowl’s hand closed over the little sphere, wrapping warmly around Jazz’s fingers.

“I think that’s enough unpacking for today,” the wizard murmured, bending down to claim a kiss. Prowl took the sphere from Jazz’s hand and set it back on its little stand without looking, or even breaking the kiss. “Come with me.”

 _Frag, yes!_ “Upstairs?” Jazz managed, against Prowl’s mouth.

“Upstairs,” Prowl agreed.

Jazz was remarkably glad the house had ramps connecting the floors because he wasn’t sure he could have managed stairs. Not with Prowl taking him to bed, not with their frequent pauses to kiss and touch and ramp up each other’s need.

“I should caution you,” Prowl said as they hit the fourth-floor landing, “interfacing with me can be…intense. I’ve processing power well above the average. It can be overwhelming, I’m told. You must tell me if it’s too much.”

From a lot of mecha that would’ve sounded like bragging. From Prowl, Jazz had no doubt it was just a fact.

“I will,” Jazz promised. “Not scared though. Getting overwhelmed’s kinda the point for me.”

Prowl’s optics darkened with lust. “Good. This way.”

The room Prowl had picked for his own was the master suite on the fourth floor. Jazz hadn’t been in it before, and now all he registered was ‘big,’ ‘fancy,’ and ‘has an insanely comfortable bed,’ that last as Prowl guided him down onto it. Then Prowl was above him, astride him, filling all his senses.

Prowl took Jazz’s hands in his, leaning over him and pressing their linked hands down on the mattress. Their hip and wrist ports were aligned, ready for them to open and make the connections. Jazz could hear the wizard’s systems running hot, feel the tremble of eagerness in his legs. Prowl’s voice was thick with desire when he spoke.

“Open for me, dearest Jazz?”

“Yeah,” Jazz agreed eagerly. “Anything for you, babe.” He opened the ports on his wrist, on his hips, gasping and arching when Prowl’s jacks slid home. “Prowl, please…”

“Go on,” Prowl urged. “Connect. I want to feel you in my systems.”

Jazz didn’t need more encouragement than that. Prowl shivered when Jazz plugged into him. The connection established fast, driven by Prowl’s powerful systems and Jazz’s want.

“Ah,” Prowl breathed at even this light touch of Jazz’s processor. “Wondrous.” He squeezed Jazz’s hands. “Let go for me, my darling,”

Jazz did so, feeling himself beginning to tip over into everything that was _Prowl_ , tip and finally fall.

***

Prowl shook Jazz gently awake at an hour of the morning that Jazz would have preferred not to see on his weekend. It might be normal for most mechs, but Jazz was a performer mentored by a performer and was naturally someone to stay up till well after midnight and ‘charging late. Weekends were supposed to be his break from weird ‘normal-mech’ cycles! Not to mention he’d been hoping for some lazy cuddling and ‘facing with his favourite wizard once they were both awake.

“I want to bring you in on a communiqué,” Prowl told him. “It’s from Rewind. Please accept.”

“Mmf. Sure.” Jazz accepted the request and slumped back down on his pillow, on his side facing Prowl, optics dimming. The sooner that whatever this was got done, the sooner they could jack back into each other. Jazz had never minded having a third in the bed, but this wasn’t what he’d been thinking of.

‘ _Rewind, Jazz is on the comm with us now,’_ Prowl said. ‘ _Please, continue. You said you have recalled who trapped you?’_

_‘Yes. It was Shockwave.’_

Prowl frowned, and Jazz regretfully gave up his plans for the morning. That was Prowl’s ‘must solve the problem’ face and while he wore it any other activities were pretty much out.

‘ _I see,’_ Prowl said. ‘ _Do you yet recall why, or how?’_

_‘Not yet. I’m working on it with Blaster.’_

_‘Please continue. Compile a file on everything you remember, whether it is clear or not, and forward it to me when complete.’_

_‘I’ll do that.’_

_‘Thank you, Rewind.’_

Everyone said their farewells, even Jazz who hadn’t contributed anything else, and the comm ended.

“Second time Shockwave’s come up in less than two deca-cycles,” Jazz observed.

“True,” Prowl acknowledged. “But given the small number of wizards turned warlock it's hardly surprising his would be the designation connected with two negative events. Still,” and to Jazz’s surprise Prowl lay back down, hand on Jazz’s hip, “it has kept for eighteen thousand meta-cycles. It will keep until Rewind’s file is complete.” He regarded Jazz analytically. “You seem surprised.”

Jazz shrugged the shoulder he wasn’t lying on. Okay, maybe it was petty, but… “You had your ‘gotta solve it’ face on. Usually means you’re about to get into whatever just got your attention.”

“Ah, my love,” Prowl said with genuine understanding. He slipped a hand between Jazz and Jazz’s pillow, cradling the musician’s face in his palm. “I had much rather spend the morning with you.”

Jazz smiled, immensely relieved. “Yeah? Good.” He claimed a warm, lazy kiss that filled him with contentment. “Hey.”

“Mmm?” The hand Prowl had had on Jazz’s hip was beginning to wander to some enticing places.

“You used the ‘L’ word.”

“I did, yes.”

“The ‘Big ‘L,’’” Jazz pressed, elation growing inside him.

“Yes...” A teasing smile, at odds with the wizard’s gently rousing touch, quirked one corner of Prowl’s mouth.

Okay. Wow. They were having it. They were having this conversation. The one Jazz had been wondering how to bring about for mega-cycles now and Prowl just dropped it on him. It was so very – very _Prowl_ Jazz couldn’t help but grin.

“Yeah, babe,” Jazz said warmly, feeling Prowl’s fingers requesting entry to his wrist port. He granted it gladly, eagerly anticipating the slide and lock of Prowl’s jacks. “Love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Would you believe I didn’t even realize I was playing off the phrase ‘music of the spheres’ until partway through? The Pratchett reference was wholly intentional, though.  
> \---  
> Here are the inspirations for Prowl’s new house:  
> [See Inside a Gilded Age Townhouse on the Upper East Side](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/g21273743/upper-east-side-gilded-age-townhouse/)  
> [Sold for $42million - the Gilded Age New York City mansion with seven floors and its own servants' quarters (butler not included)](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163800/Sold-42million--Gilded-Age-New-York-City-mansion-seven-floors-servants-quarters.html)  
> The [floor plan](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/06/24/article-2163800-13BE22AD000005DC-488_964x533.jpg) is based on the house in the latter link, except I dropped the floor with the servant’s quarters and substituted the music room for the bedroom suite on the third floor.


End file.
